[MUD-Dev] banning the sale of items

[Matthew Mihaly]

On Sun, 16 Apr 2000, Par Winzell wrote:

> Matthew Mihaly writes:
> 
> First, there is no such thing as free time, there are only priorities.
> Second, when I play with someone in a Mud, I don't care if they have to
> go feed their kitten regularly or work 80 hours a week. Certainly from
> your point of view, free time is a vital variable in how to pitch your
> game, but I am your customer and I don't give a damn.

My first inclination here was to say that yeah, you're right, and, in
fact, I had typed that out, but I still think you aren't.. It occurs to me
now how many times I've heard adult customers with lives complaining about
how much time some of the college students have to play the game and get
ahead. Often these are the people who then want to buy things from me to
make up for not making the game their top priority. I'm not saying you
feel this way, but obviously at least some semi-significant section of the
population disagrees.


>  > If we're talking about big MMORPGs here, who cares if it creates a better
>  > game. All that matters (or should matter to me, if the game is being
>  > created for a publically-traded company) is how much profit it makes. 
> 
> Just define "better game" as one that makes more money. Personally I like
> to live in the intersection of quality and profitability. I'm never going
> to be an officer of a public company, though I may come to feel obligated
> to do at least well (not ultra-optimized-well) for a private company.

Well, I personally believe that profitiability DOES require a high level
of quality. People (myself included) may have a beef with some things EQ
or whatever has done, but I think they are a highly quality game. Private
companies are, imho, a completely different matter and need not act at all
efficiently if they don't want to. 

<stuff snipped about theoretical privileged background giving advantage in
a game>
 
> You're arguing with somebody else. I told you, I don't care about fair.
> No, of course I don't object to such designs. In fact, I much prefer to
> be surrounded by articulate and intelligent people if I have the choice.
> Being able to communicate clearly makes you a superior player; your bank
> account does not. Your education makes you an asset to a game, the cash
> you spent on a sword does not. Investment of your time in a game makes
> you give a damn, investment of your money actually makes you respect it
> a little less.

Right, well, yes, if you are speaking as a player who has no money or
isn't willing to spend any money, then sure, I'd agree. And I'd have to
disagree about investment of money making you respect a game less. I can
tell you that our most worshipful players are, not surprisingly, the ones
that spend lots of money (why else would they be spending so much? And
it's not as if they spend a big sum once and then never again. It's an
ongoing thing.)

In Achaea, I definitely encourage intelligent, articulate people (you
commented to me, I think, on the fact that you were impressed with the
quality of people you found in Achaea), but I think it's a niche market. I
make a point of doing things like making a rare visible appearance
specifically to publically ridicule idiots. Yesterday, for instance,
some newbie actually shouted something that contained the word d00d. I
turned him into a shrub and banned his ip immediately, which got the other
players all cheering. (I was shocked. First time I'd seen someone shout
that teenage hacker slang.) This works fine on a small mud, where you can
make the players feel like they are part of the "elite" (NOT l33t damn
it), but I think it'd be really hard to set this sort of atmosphere on a
big game without coming across as a real tyrant and driving away too many
players.

> What I'm saying is very straightforward. The flow of RL money into the
> game has a negative effect. I believe the perceived quality of the game
> (which translates fairly directly into shareholder value) is insensitive
> to this negative effect up to a breaking point. Past this point there is
> a sense of unease which threatens to escalate into distaste... and when
> distaste happens, your audience begins to thin out.

I dunno that it does. I mean, have you seen this happen before in a game
that made some attempt to balance the selling of items? (which we do...you
can't just out and out buy anything....I refused to sell someone a house
the other day for US$3500 because it called for a special room that I
deemed to detrimental to the game as a whole). 

Currently, one thing that you absolutely can't buy with real money is
gold. Furthere, there are things (shops for instance) that you can _only_
buy with gold. This has been a pretty established principle in my mind for
some time in terms of how to ensure that the players who aren't rich don't
feel screwed over too much (clearly there will be a few that do anyway,
but I think we've done a remarkably good job considering that our entire
skill system is based around buying most of your skills). However, I've
been calling it into question in my mind lately. I mentioned it at lunch,
but I wasn't feeling particularly coherent that day.

Why not sell gold, I ask myself? Well, answer is simply that it'd create
too much inflation by increasing the money supply. But, we have really two
in-game currencies. One is gold. The other are credits, which you get in
one of a few ways (buying them is the most prominent, mentoring people who
buy them is second most prominent, and doing work for the game in customer
service or whatnot is the third way. We give away credits as prizes in
contests and such too). So, I do get quite a few requests to buy gold, all
of which I've refused so far. Some of the richest players in gold are,
however, some of the ones that have either never bought anything from us,
or who have bought very little. What would lose rich-in-gold,
poor-in-credits players love? Credits, so that they can buy special items
and skills. 

So I am thinking that what I may do is allow players to buy things from
each other with credits. This already happens off of Achaea in the same
way that it happens in EQ, except that it's person-to-person transactions,
not going through E-bay (you EQ guys paying attention? It's going to
happen regardless of whether you ban E-bay or not.) So why not facilitate?
If Bob has acquired 100k gold but is too poor to credits, we make nothing.
But, if Bob meets Leon, and Leon is a corrupt politician with money to
burn, but no time to make gold (being a corrupt politician is a busy
life), why not let Leon buy the gold from Bob. Credits use essentially no
limited resource on our part, there is no opportunity cost to us, as Bob
wouldn't have bought credits anyway. So suddenly, everybody is happy. Bob
is happy because he has credits now, and didn't before (he's got time to
make back extra gold, as Bob is a sheperd, with nothing but sheep and time
on his hands). Leon is happy because he's got gold to start his
corrupt-politician-in-a-mud life, and we are happy because Leon had to buy
the credits from us to pay Bob. 

Now, obviously there are risks doing this, but I don't think they are that
high. There isn't much of a competition to be the richest player, as there
are no publically available metrics on it. Further, I suspect that our
players would actually be fairly happy about this state of affairs. I'm
quite interested in testing this out now, and will do so forthwith I
think. May have to make some more expensive things to buy with gold first
though, as being really rich isn't particularly valuable currently in
Achaea.

Something just popped into my mind. Arcades. How many arcade games do you
know where the way to win is simply to keep pumping more quarters in,
because you want to beat the high score? Lots of 'em. There is one of
those stupid video machines down at the local bar, with lots of various
games on it, and I was talking to a guy playing it one night, as he just
kept feeding in dollar after dollar after dollar, playing the same game.
Upon querying what he was doing, he said that he had to have the high
score, and that all he had to do to get it was keep putting in money. And
before you say something about community, let me point out that he's a
regular, and the person whose score he was trying to beat was standing
about 10 feet away playing pool.


> I think Achaea is far away from this, and it may be that EQ has such bad
> problems in other areas that the effect from this problem is unnoticable.
> But the general problem is on my mind a lot and I think it's foolish to
> be dismissive of a sound intuition.

Indeed it is, but my intuition tells me that it can be done on a large
scale. I'm not sure I know the way to do it, but I feel strongly that it
can be done. 

 
> (I also can't resist the off-topic but strong denouncement of the notion
> that you have to have an economically priviliged backgroud to learn how
> to handle English and to think straight. :)

Hey now, I didn't say that. You don't need one, but it helps. There's a
reason literacy rates, for instance, are low in poor areas.

--matt




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